Halloween at The Woods House

WRITOBER FLASH FICTION CHALLENGE: Embracing our Deepest Fears.

I fell behind in completing my challenge last month- I was on vacation and then I caught a cold. But I want to finish what I started so I’m going to finish up my H’ween Challenge!

Photo by Pumpkinrot

My family does not appreciate my efforts in celebrating the holiday season.

They don’t like the food I prepare, they don’t like the decorations, they don’t like my efforts to bring a little life to our otherwise dull and quiet home.

” Why does she put us through this? My family asks each other. “Can’t she read the room? Nobody likes all of this dark and morbid stuff. Nobody wants to eat the food she leaves on the kitchen table.  I swear to God. She’s like a cat dragging a half eaten rat home and leaving it in your favorite pair of shoes as a ‘gift’.”

I like my cuts of meat rare, I thought they did too. I suppose they like it warmer then I’m used too. Garlic I thought, maybe I should add some garlic.

A few days ago I heard them in the kitchen and it broke my heart.

” Maybe we should you know- maybe we should get someone to talk to her. Someone she will listen too. ” Bonnie  told my Great Grandson.

I backed up from the doorway  and hid around the corner.

My Great Grandson, who I always considered to be a good egg told his mother Bonnie, ” What if she won’t listen? What if she goes on decorating the front porch with skeletons and severed heads and bowls of candy? What if she keeps on cooking- ” well. I don’t know what this is, but what if she won’t stop? I love her, but seriously Mom. She makes us look like a family of serial killers every Halloween.”

Bonnie took my dish from the table and looked down into it. ” Well. I suppose we call the Priest- she listens to them. Not that she has much choice. Maybe he can talk her into staying in her room for awhile ” she told my Great Grandson Tucker. ” The bottom line is we can’t have her making us look like serial killers for Halloween- or any other day for that matter. Socially it could be the death of us all ”

Bonnie’s husband called from the hallway as he lumbered down the stairs from the attic, ” we weren’t the Serial Killers. That was my Mom’s gig when she was alive. We’re spree killers. There’s a difference.”

The Voracious Reader

All of us that work in the old Library on Fremont Street

and those of us that knew how to get our keys to open the old and uncooperative locks

and the few of us who knew which books were truly old and not aged by careless hands just by how they stood in their places on the shelves

knew that  when Lorelle Coldman took a book down went to read it at her favorite table at the end of the hall ( where nobody sat because the light wasn’t very good back there )

that sometimes she got lost in her book and we would have to go and get her at closing time.

Last night at closing she got lost in a book and my co-worker Flora went to find her and found that not only was  Lorelle lost in her book- Flora was lost too.

I thought I could hear them calling to me when I opened the doors this morning- but to be honest- I didn’t go and check to see if they were still lost in the book Lorelle had been reading.

There are voracious readers- as we know- and sometimes there are very voracious books just waiting to be fed- I mean

read.

Artist Unknown